Anu Garg is the great-grandfather of all the word and language sites on the internet.
(Although at barely 60, he’s a bit young to be a great grandfather!)
The point is that he launched his Wordsmith.org website (and his ‘A Word A Day’ service) almost as soon as the Internet was available.
And it continues to this day.
I mention this because one of his recent words strikes me as especially useful for us here in Australian just at the moment.
He wrote about this word ‘pseudologue’—which means ‘habitual liar.’
When our prime minister retreats from the truth and is caught out in lie after lie after lie, we need a word that neatly, and almost clinically, names a habitual liar—a word that names his problem.
The word is recorded from 1949 and has almost exclusively (I would have thought) been used by psychologists as a technical term to describe a difficult patient they are dealing with.
The word combines two Greek roots— ‘pseudo’ (meaning falsity or falsehood) and ‘logue’ (meaning speech or discourse).
The following is a quote from the Psychiatric Quarterly of 1949: ‘Pseudologues have little or no insight into real behaviour or into the harm they may cause others.’
Perhaps a useful word to label constant deviation from the truth.
So, you can think of this very useful word the next time you come across defiant statements along the follow lines: ‘No, I didn’t fall of the stage’; ‘No, I wasn’t jeered at when I visited Lakemba mosque’; ‘No, I won’t change negative gearing or capital gains tax’; ‘I promise your power bill will drop by $275’; ‘No, I didn’t make lewd remarks about the Japanese prime minister’; and ‘I promised my local golf club $6 million dollars to fix a sewage problem.’
Is it just me?
Or does that sound like a ‘pseudologue’ to you?
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BY THE WAY...
If you'd like to see my A-Z list of Aussie slang, you'll find it here in the Australian Geographic website -- A-Z list of Aussie slang. Here’s the link: The A-Z of Aussie slang - Australian Geographic
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